Abstract
The cheerleader effect occurs when the same individual appears to be more attractive when seen in a group, compared to alone. As observers over-attend to visual information presented in the left visual field, we investigated whether the spatial arrangement of the faces in a group would influence the magnitude of the cheerleader effect. In Experiment 1, target faces were presented twice in the centre of the display: once alone, and once in a group. Group images featured two distractor faces, which were presented in either the left or the right visual field, or on either side of the target. The location of the distractor faces did not modulate the size of the cheerleader effect, which was observed in each group configuration. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the location of the target faces, which were presented at the far left, far right, or centre of the group. Faces were again significantly more attractive in each group configuration, and the spatial location of the target face did not influence the size of the cheerleader effect. Together, our results show that the cheerleader effect is a robust phenomenon, which is not influenced by the spatial arrangement of the faces in the group.
Highlights
The cheerleader effect occurs when the same individual appears to be more attractive when seen in a group, compared to alone
A one-way within-participants analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to investigate whether the strength of the cheerleader effect differed depending on the configuration of the distractor faces (LVF, BL, right visual field (RVF))
Our results strongly suggest that the spatial arrangement of the distractor faces does not modulate the strength of the cheerleader effect
Summary
The cheerleader effect occurs when the same individual appears to be more attractive when seen in a group, compared to alone. Faces were again significantly more attractive in each group configuration, and the spatial location of the target face did not influence the size of the cheerleader effect. The cheerleader effect strongly suggests that it is the attractiveness of the individual face that is evaluated, but that the surrounding faces are encoded by the observer, which interfere with attractiveness evaluations[11] Together, these findings show that attractiveness judgments change when an individual appears in a group, and that the social perception of an individual within a group is a unique process, whereby irrelevant faces influence our judgments of specific individuals[11]. Brady and Alvarez[21] suggest that ensemble coding occurs hierarchically, such that the average characteristics of the group influence the recall of individual items from the same group
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